The title and description meta tags are a very important factor, perhaps you can set the title tag as the topic of your paper and write a short description for the description tag.

Like a few people have said, inbound links to your site are the most important factor. I haven't seen page size mentioned, the smaller your page is, the easier and faster googlebot can crawl your site. This *may* result in more of your pages being indexed and *may* put you further up a little.

I in SEO industry for 5 years. Now i have SEO company, we work a lot and we are using different methods and so on. But the main think (as it was and 3 and 5 years ago) - is high quality links to you site. It's so, and it's a RULE. And only google could change it.

That helps. Thanks for the elaboration.

Hi Rick, sorry I wasn't more descriptive on the META info. I meant the title, subject, and keywords within the description tab. When the PDF document appears in search engine results, the title you enter for the document will appear as the web page title, document subject is web page description. The keywords entered in the PDF will help the document appear in results for those words (among other things, keywords are just one aspect).

For example, I recently wrote a research report for B2B tech marketers and will use the following for the META info:

Title: The Most Powerful Online Tool for Influencing B2B Technology Buyers

Subject: Marketing research report and survey reveal what online methods are effective in persuading sales decision makers

Keywords: b2b; technology; btob; marketing; business-to-business; software; hardware; online; Web; Internet, sales; lead generation; research; survey

Hope this helps!

In the context of white papers, what would be considered the META information that Kim Cornwall Malseed suggests entering into the PDF properties description tab? Examples?

Thanks for the tips. I think one of the best ideas is giving out white papers to my partners and customers for getting them to post it on their websites.

Many companies post white papers to their websites in PDF, but forget to optimize the PDF for search.

To correctly format PDFs in Acrobat, you need to open your image-based PDF and run “optical character recognition.” Go to the “document” menu. It will scan your document and translate the image-text into text that can be edited so search engines can read it.

Then go to the "file" menu, select "properties" and in the "description" tab enter META information.

After doing keyword research, re-formatting a client's white paper and re-posting it, after 4 months the number of downloads went from about 10/month to averaging 50/month.

"Try to ensure that each page (i.e. each URL) has approximately 500 words on it with your most important keywords repeated 10-12 times per page"

Make sure to use variations on your main keywords, especially those long tail ones that relate directly to the purpose of the white paper.

"Give out your white papers to your partners and customers and try to get them to post it on their websites"

Do some blogger outreach to find those high-authority blogs that may be willing to promote your white paper. Also, optimized press releases may be a good option and can provide incoming links to the white paper (especially if the press release is picked up by more authoritative industry blogs or websites).

<abbr>Kari's last blog post..Whole Lotta Link Love Friday, October 3</abbr>

>Create a style format where each title of a PDF document is accompanied by a short abstract, as opposed to being a simple link, and use keywords

Is the point here about factoring our another page and optimizing it for SEO, rather than just a brief link to your PDF? (like salescopy for a product)

<abbr>J.D. Meier's last blog post..Strengths and Weaknesses vs. Personality Profiles</abbr>

None of this stuff is nearly as important as getting links from other website to the white paper or the page it resides on. And frankly, many of these suggestions are of questionable value.

• Try to get your site to contain as many static pages as possible (indexable URLs)
- This is an oversimplification of the issue and is misleading. Is Anna trying to imply that dynamic pages don’t rank? That’s absurd! The issue is that you don’t want URLs that are really long or contain question marks in them.
• Name your directories and your files using your most desired keywords (separate words with underscores)
- There is some doubt among the experts as to whether or not this helps. The issue is a chicken or egg issue. “Is the page ranking well because of the naming structure or is it ranking well because the person who would know to do this is doing other SEO stuff that’s the real reason why rankings are improving?”
• Include your keywords in all Page Titles
- Page title is a meta tag!
• Do not worry about META tags if you don’t know how to add them, your Page Title is your most important tag
- The description meta tag is important too. While it might not be as important as the Title to rankings, it is important in compelling the searcher to click on your search result versus another. Many SEO’s lose sight of the fact that it doesn’t matter how well your site ranks if no one visits it.
• Include your keywords in H1s, H2, and H3s. Make sure you use these tags!
- Yeah, it helps but not nearly as much as other stuff. She’s over emphasizing the importance of H tags.
• Create a style format where each title of a PDF document is accompanied by a short abstract, as opposed to being a simple link, and use keywords
- I don’t know why she’s calling it a “style format” when all you have to do is include a brief abstract of the white paper with key words in it on the page where the link to the white paper resides. Google can and does spider PDFs so there’s a good chance the PDF will rank well on it’s own.
• Add a ‘company name’ component in the footer of your white paper template and provide your website URL
- This isn’t going to help rankings but seems pretty obvious if you want people to contact you.
• Interlink your site’s internal pages as often as you can (e.g. use margins and place “Related Info” boxes with links to other pages on your site)
- You want to be careful with this. If it looks weird, you’re to put off actual humans and internal linking is not nearly as important as getting inks from other web pages.
• Your links should have your keyword embedded within, do not use “click here”
- I agree!
• Try to ensure that each page (i.e. each URL) has approximately 500 words on it with your most important keywords repeated 10-12 times per page
- This is a rule of thumb and not a hard and fast rule. The page should have as many words as it needs to accomplish its purpose.
• Give out your white papers to your partners and customers and try to get them to post it on their websites
- Also, link to it on your blog, you email signature line and in your social networking profiles. Remember, the ultimate purpose of SEO is not to rank well. The ultimate purpose is to make money and that requires real people to read it and take action. Ranking well and taking action are two different things!

Hey Mike,

Actually, I've found it is best to use dashes rather than underscores. If you Google this topic, you'll find many references to the fact that the spiders don't recognize underscores -- they read it as if there were no breaks at all between the letters.

This may have since changed (everything with Google changes...) but I would recommend dashes instead of underscores just to be safe.

Also, use all small caps -- some systems have problems parsing capitalized letters...

~Graham